If you are reading this the guide is probably for you!!! This guide is an updated refresh based on or in part by other similar threads throughout TPU and my own personal experience (I used to be an nvidia guide but this 290x is too fun) it also covers all current information based off of the latest ATIFLASH.(4.17 as of writing R9 compatible.)
All testing was done on windows 10 64bit.

After flashing my own I thought it might be a good idea to write an in-depth guide to help those out that may have fell to the wayside during their flashing endeavors, or maybe you're just curious!

Quick Rules of the road

This thread is not for tech help!

Please make your own thread for FLASH problems!

DO NOT hijack other peoples threads!

When making new threads give EXACT MODELS for best help!​

Lets get started!

First and foremost. Lets talk about why you would want to read this guide or flash your card. For most people this boils down to three different reasons.

1. I want better performance out of my card but I want a more permanent solution than using OC software. (Clocks/Fan ramps)

2. I want to update my bios for a feature. (UEFI Support)

3. I've bricked my card probably attempting one of the above and now I'm stuck because I never thought it would happen.

To help with all of these situations I have split them into different problems that we can tackle one by one for you. This guide is filled with humor satire and I think Pizza sauce on my keyboard. (ain't life a bitch?) Lets start with getting better performance.

If you are at all uncomfortable with flashing your card the easiest way to get performance is using third party software to increase your clock rates so that you can drive better FPS and memory bandwidth. There are a lot of different ways to do this and a lot of different tools. If you are new to overclocking in general don't be discouraged by all the information, but don't set unrealistic goals either.

As the saying goes "Overclocking is a silicone lottery." Some chips will overclock better or worse than others even if they are the same in every way. That said try to take everything with a bit of salt.

Here are some overclocking software links that are commonly used and a link to some guides you can use to try your hand at lady luck.

OK! With that out of the way let's digest things a bit! First please understand any of these guides can get outdated or unnecessary. If you're unsure just ask in the relevant sub forum of the GPU forums! moving on good luck!

Now lets start with GPU Flashing the primary point. This section will be broken up into several sub sections to help with clarity and timelining. Some of these skills or instructions will be needed as explanations become harder to understand. If you have any questions please ask them but please attempt to read the section(s) in their entirety as it may have already been explained.

Is probably the single most important part of all of this aside from doing your own backup. This GPU BIOS DB is the most comprehensive list and collection of GPU bios' you can find anywhere on the internet. For simplicity the above title is linked to the AMD/ATI section of the DB but you can access the whole database HERE.

First a rundown for those of us not interested in the scary things that come later in the guide such as bad flashing a bios, bricking your card, your grandmother walking in on your session of lonely space vixens, or losing your skyrim save data.

I want better performance out of my card but I want a more permanent solution than using OC software.​

Welcome to the world of BIOS flashing your card! Most people generally do this for experimentation or because they first found stable OC settings and would like to make them more permanent. There is nothing wrong with either but lets get some SUPER basics down first.

NEVER FLASH UNTIL YOU HAVE BACKED UP YOUR CURRENT BIOS!

NEVER FLASH VIA WINDOWS!

NEVER FLASH OVERCLOCKED!

TRY NOT TO FLASH WITH MORE THAN 1 GPU!

Have you read that? good read it again..awesome lets tackle them one at a time.

Never flash until you have backed up your current bios!

This is a no brainer really. This is super important and is most importantly EASY TO DO! It also gives you a way to save your ass later if you mess up! Why? Let's face it even if you are 100% certain that the bios you picked will work there is always a chance you need to RMA (you warranty voiding heathen!) re-sell or otherwise manage to botch your flash. This can all be remedied by flashing the original back since well you know...it worked to begin with.

How to backup your bios​

Lets start by grabbing GPU-Z a nifty little utility you probably already use to stare at the specs of your really expensive minecraft machine.

Now lets open it up!

Here is the primary screen of GPU-Z here we will dump the bios from our GPU to save at a later time. simply click where I have circled.

This button image or whatever may change with future revisions of GPU-Z but I imagine it will most likely always be next to the bios version string. When in doubt just mouse over the various bits and it will tell you what it does. once you click it we need to name it.

By default it saves as .rom which is good since its the format we will be using to flash. By default GPU-Z saves it as the architecture name. case in point Hawaii.rom however lets change that to orig.rom or original.rom this is an easy way to make sure you always know the name of your backup bios file incase the worst happens.

NEVER flash via Windows​

Flashing in windows is a terrible Idea Too many things can go wrong such as interrupts from annoying UAC prompts to updates or spiked CPU load. The options are endless and your chances of success are too slim for this to be worth it. I will explain later how to flash the proper way. It will take you maybe an extra 5min and you should seriously consider doing it. If you decide to not heed this warning and flash via windows anyway and totally scramble your GPUs brains I have a section for that but not sympathy. In Fact I will probably publicly shame you. So just read the guide leave a thanks and not say a thing.

Never flash overclocked​

This is another one of the cardinal rules laid out for you. Much like the flashing in windows warning there is alot that can go wrong. Even if you have done your mobo bios another card whatever overclocked I can personally say I have wrecked boards doing this. Most motherboards now have profiles you can save and all of them have a quick menu option to restore to defaults usually on the save/exit page and in almost 100% of cases the default reset key is F9 there is literally no excuse to do it since it's easy and fast to do and easy and fast to revert back. I cannot stress this enough.

Try not to flash with more than 1 GPU​

Like the title states. this isn't so much a rule as it is a failsafe against yourself and ease of the process. With the onset of card mixing for physics or performance and the steady upward slope of SLI/Crossfire systems multi-GPU systems are here to stay. The problem in some cases is in fact the damn good compatibility. With certain manufacturers playing nice with others at different clocks its easy to mix cards between brands even if they dont necissarily play well with each others clocks or memory timings the driver takes care of the rest. However a mistake of this type when flashing can leave you with nothing but problems. I generally recommend flashing with only the GPU intended to be flashed instead of the team you may have working for you. This makes the chance of mistake lower and the flashing process a bit easier.

With the rules out of the way let's get started with flashing for the noob. Upto this point please refer to the things learned thus far and we at this point will run under the assumption you have read it understood it and have a perfectly working card that you just want to flash.

To get started go ahead and grab the "flash package" attached at the bottom of this post which contains everything needed to get you started! Unzip it to a directory so you can easily manage the files. After which lets do the following.

Individual files attached below are provided for people that are having a hard time finding specific things. The "Flash Package" contains all of the attached files in one nice package.

If you run into ANY problems saving your bios via ATIFLASH or you have issues FLASHING Try making the USB with RUFUS!
Walk-through at the bottom of post #2​

1.) Get a thumb drive 64mb or greater.
2.) Unplug all other removable drives from your machine (USB, SD, External HDD etc)
3.) Run the HP Disk storage tool as Administrator.
4.) In the Tool make sure your device appears under the "Device" drop down list

5.) Check the box "Create A DOS startup disk using system files located at"
6.) click the "..." browse button and navigate to the directory you extracted this from.
7.) Click on the "win98boot" folder and press "OK"
8.) Now click "Start" inside the HP format tool.

9.) After the format completes COPY atiflash.exe and xxx.rom where xxx.rom is the actual name of your bios .rom file. This should be 5 or less characters. Also remember to copy over your original!

10.) After the copy completes Please make sure if your GPU comes with a bios switch it is in position number 1!!!!! If it is not or you are uncertain shut down your machine and make sure of this now! Generally it is marked on the PCB and most times the "1" position is towards the rear of the PC case (assuming card is installed) However it is good to lookup and verify these positions yourself. Please check with your GPU manufacturer for more details.

11.) Reboot your machine and Press F12, F10, F9, ESC, or whatever button brings you to your system boot menu.
12.) Select your thumb drive and hit enter.
13.) You will be greeted with a black and white DOS screen and a blinking cursor.
14.) Run the following command to get the adapter number no quotes please. "atiflash -i"

14b.) If you have not backed up your bios yet via GPU-Z above take this time to do it now using this command atiflash -s 0 orig.rom where "0" is your adapter number!​

Any overclocking or mods past this point need to fall into their own threads since they won't be supported here. However if things were not fun and games and terrible things happened lets continue into the deep dark world of unbreaking your new paper weight.

HELP i've flashed but I can't boot up​

This is a pretty brutal section of the guide and probably one of the hardest to swallow. Luckily I've managed to put together this comprehensive list of nutella recipes that will calm your wife down; while you explain to her that the big electric thingy you bought for your virtual gun box worth $700 is currently spending its existence holding down your water bill.

Jokes aside lets take this easy I know you're probably trying to skip most of this. Darting your eyes this way and that hoping an end to the dry humor is near so that you can hurriedly fix your GPU and put yourself in a worse position than you currently are. However I won't let that happen. One of the most important part of this section is the ability to have a few laughs and stay calm. Trying to rush will lead to RMA, permanent brick, system downtime, low bank account, and probably angry significant other. So lets do this slow and steady so that you have the best chances at saving the mistake. I cannot guarantee your card will work. I can however guarantee that if you follow this guide your best foot will be forward and you will have a better chance than you would otherwise. Lets start.

A few different ways exist to flash and save a video card. I will be doing them in order from least difficult to most difficult.

First and foremost. Lets look at the cardinal rules set out at the beginning of the guide. Follow them to a T. Once you have made your flash drive and made sure your system is stock we can continue. Lets talk about issues with this statement though.

First lets take a deep breath and solve your no boot issue before we get to flashing. Take this time to

We are going to be under the assumption you have read and understood the cardinal rules of bios flashing.

If you do not have a setting in your bios that allows you to specify the default VGA adapter then having the GPU that needs to be flashed in a secondary slot (usually lower than the first slot on the motherboard that allows a graphics card.) will usually work since most motherboards auto delegate the first GPU as the primary.

You can also use various combinations of advanced recovery to get yourself either booting or more importantly a flash drive.

If you do not have a backup of your bios and your GPU can boot using a bios switch located on the card boot into windows and dump the bios from the second chip and use IT to flash the affected eeprom chip. You can also download the correct BIOS from the GPU database while you are in windows to use to falsh the card back.

So you don't have a thumb drive? I really recommend buying or finding a static drive you can have on you at all times to flash with. If you don't have one make one on another machine now. If you live in Alaskan wilderness and have no way of using a friends PC and do not own another PC lets follow the directions below to get a display. Once display is obtained we can boot into windows while limping and make a drive that can save us. Now lets see what our options are using the various methods of getting display.

1.) let's reset your CMOS so we are on a clean slate by removing the battery on your board. This will allow us to make sure we are attempting flashes using the cardinal rule "DO NOT FLASH OVERCLOCKED"

2.) Do you have a bios switch on your GPU? If you do shut down your system now switch it to another position and attempt to boot your rig.

2b.) Let's restart the PC if all is well you are now booting off of the second bios on your GPU.

With your GPU working in the other bios switch position boot to your flash drive until you are at the root prompt and cursor. At this point it is assumed you have NOT ran any commands.

With your side panel off take this time to switch your bios switch to the opposite position (corrupted) with the system running. Make sure it is in the position it was on when it was corrupted.

Now lets follow the flashing guide making sure at this point and time you FLASH BACK THE ORIGINAL, BACKUP, or CLOSEST COMPATIBLE BIOS!!​

3.) If you do not have a BIOS switch remove the Affected GPU and boot using onboard video and in your BIOS set onboard Video as the default VGA adapter. In some cases with some motherboards it will be necessary to ENABLE the onboard GPU FIRST and THEN make it the default VGA adapter!

3b.) Shut down your system and re-insert the damaged GPU.

Start the system using onboard VGA and again using the flash guide above re-attempt to flash your GPU please take note to use

atiflash -i

To get the adapter number since using onboard VGA will change the previous command parameter you are familiar with.​

4.) If you do not have onboard VGA please reproduce step 3.)using any spare VGA card compatible with your system. Boot using the compatible VGA card and set it as default.

4b.) Shut down your system and re-insert the damaged GPU.

Start the system using secondary VGA and again using the flash guide above re-attempt to flash your GPU please take note to use

atiflash -i

To get the adapter number since using a secondary VGA card will change the previous command parameter you are familiar with.​

With any luck you will have managed to fix your issue now. I will change and expand on this guide as time leisure and changes worth noting warrant it. If you have any questions additions or pictures of kittens please leave them below.

ATIFlash Commands​

Below is a list of ATIFlash commands. This list is more for reference but also includes some useful information. My time is limited so it is a work in progress. However I will be adding to it over time. In all examples I will use "X" as adapter number unless otherwise specified.

SPECIAL: If you receive the following error "Failed to read ROM ERROR 0FL01 : press '1' to continue"

You need to unlock the rom of the chip for writing, OR The flash command was not typed properly and the syntax is incorrect.

(Pro tip for any bros that want to dump this in the future in case i fall off the face of the planet the -log command will not dump these instructions. I also did not copy this verbose from pictures. I copied atiflash to a 32bit windows XP virtual machine (I think all that matters is that the OS is 32bit) I then opened a command prompt and navigated to atiflash.exe and typed "ATIFLASH -H" without quotes. I then used the "Mark" feature of cmd.exe by right clicking and selecting mark to copy all the text that was output.)

Alrighty! Now I know in this day and age a windows only guide just won't do so I wanted to make sure our Linux boys were taken care of! This guide will show you howto setup a bootable flash drive without windows. The actual flash procedure and commands will be the same. Without further adieu lets start!

First this is based off of debian installations. I don't cover gentoo or any other code sets. In particular this walkthrough covers Ubuntu 14.04. There are no special programs installed but the OS is upto date.

Lets start by opening terminal since we need to get a few pre-requisites out of the way. We will be using unetbootin to create our thumb drive and freedos to manage the actual flash procedure.

With the terminal open we need to install unetbootin. You can also manually download unetbootin from there SITE but for all intensive purposes this is probably easier.

With the terminal open we will be typing the following command:

Code:

sudo apt-get install unetbootin

enter your password and press Y to download and install the program.

With everything downloaded now please insert your USB flash drive if you have not already!

Now that your USB drive is plugged in lets format it really quick and get it ready for unetbootin.

In the search type

Code:

Disks

we will be using this utility to format our drives. This utility is installed by default on Ubuntu 14 and may be installed by default in earlier versions. however if it is not you can use gparted install disks or use any disk manager you want.

With disks open lets take a look at the drive. we will left click to select it and click the gear icon on the right to give us a menu that will allow us to format the drive. Also in the disks menu it will give us the physical drive address. We will need to remember this in a moment to use unetbootin.

After clicking format we will be greeted with a screen. I simply name my flash drive Flash and leave all the rest of the settings default. After just hit "format" and were off!

Now that our format is complete lets re-mount the thumb drive so unetbootin can use it. You can do that by simply clicking the "Play" button under the drive.

Now lets open unetbootin you can find it by searching for it by name and simply clicking the icon.

Once unetbootin is open we can select the distribution to use. We will be using Free-Dos for this. In this case the original 1.0 works fine. That said all subsequent versions might also work. simply select it from the drop down and press ok. There is no need to fiddle with anything else. However if you want to manually use a newer version of Free-dos that is NOT available already in the version drop down you can download them at the Free-Dos website. and simply select "diskimage"

Now lets hit the "OK" button to begin writing Free-Dos to our drive. Be sure to make sure that the USB drive being targeted is the right one. Like I said above the Disks program shows you the physical name of the drive. however we can also take a quick peak by opening terminal and typing

Code:

lsblk

Make sure both the drive and unetbootins target are the same!

Once you have made sure the drive is correct and you hit "OK" if you get the following error;

You need to go back to the above picture and hit the "Play" button in the Disks program. Assuming you don't run into any problems you will start to see unetbootin goto work!

After it is complete it will ask you to reboot but we DO NOT want to do that right now. Instead close the box and go into the flash drive itself.

Once inside the drive copy over atiflash.exe and the rom file you want to use.

Once you are all done you can reboot your PC and boot off your new flash drive! You will be greeted with the following screen!

After hitting enter it will bring you to the main menu. Please select the option "FreeDos Safe Mode (don't load any drivers) for best and safest results.

hit enter again after using your arrows to navigate to the above selection and you will be greeted with

Code:

A:/

prompt. simply type

Code:

DIR

to see if you can find atiflash.exe and the .rom file you copied over. Most of the time it is NOT in the first partition and so we need to move to other partitions to find it.

no luck with A:/ lets try B: by typing the following command

Code:

CD B:

or

Code:

B:

nope not yet! Atleast for me.. Understand that for you personally it may be any drive letter you could score big and get it on A:! However for most of us we need to keep using

Code:

CD X:

or

Code:

X:

Where "X" is the drive letter. We will need to keep navigating partitions until we come across the one that has atiflash; remember use the "DIR" command after you change partitions to see the files so that you know when to stop.

YAY! I got mine on C: now that you are in the partition that holds atiflash and your .rom file you can use atiflash using the above flashing guide. All the commands are the same. The only thing that is diffirent is that you made your thumb drive in linux and used Free-Dos. no functionality has changed as far at ATIFLASH is concerned. GO you!

Flashing with RUFUS​

Rufus is another popular USB creator. RUFUS like the HP format utility makes it easy to create DOS boot-up disks with little effort. It provides binaries for both MS-DOS or FreeDos built in. to grab rufus simply click HEREAfter you download it we can open it up. The following screen will appear. Its much the same procedure as the HP format utility outlined in the first post. simply make sure your thumb drive is the targeted one via the drop down. Then you can select the DOS method you wish to use on the thumb drive. FreeDos in my experience works better with RUFUS the MS-Dos option tends to fail on big thumb drives. Though I personally need to test this more.

After you hit start it will take a few moments and then you will be greeted with a screen saying your thumbdrive is ready to use!

At this point you are ready to start copying over your BIOS files. This method is the same as the HP format utility you read about in the first post. Simply copy ATIFLASH and the BIOS roms of your choice to the root of the drive.

You're all done! At this point the thumb drive is finished! You can go ahead and follow the rest of the guide as usual. The actual flash instructions are the same!

Well my compliments on the entire write up!! That is a solid piece of work.

I would like to add some remarks :
First off the version off atiflash used does matter. So check you have the correct one. In general atiflash.exe might pop up as atiflash=1.47.exe (or similar).
Be sure to rename it to atiflash.exe

Also the command used while flashing depends on wether you flash a gpu with a bios from the same manufacturer or if its different. Only for flashing the bios to other manufacturers bios you need the =f command = force flash

You can pull up all possible dos commands by typing atiflash.exe /? (or =? Forgot which it was but test and you will see) best practice is to exemine the possible commands before typing what someone told you to do)

2. The reason for flashing =in my opinion= often makes no sense. The performance gain with small changes is at best minimal. I dare say in 24/7 use not noticeable.
If you are a overclocker running competitive its a hole different story... But then i am talking custum bios versions modded by techies from manufacturers or top oc teams. Then performance gains are to be found.. But only possible with very very stirdy cooling methods.
.
3. flashing more than1 gpu at a time is only a problem if the cards are not identical (iin that case why bother because optimization cannot be optimal)

4. For those that started flashing away i feel no remorse.. Blow up some 600 euro gpu's that will teach them.

For those that have reason to flash, frankly mostly overclockers that compete: we all know exactly when to flash: hitting voltage sealing with no thermal issues at hand.

Personally I solder and alter whatever is necessary but only iff I am 100% sure that all oother boundaries have been pushed to extreme limits.

I just flashed and unlocked 3 reference r9 290x cards with huge shift in oc ranges. Voltage core up to 2 volt. Frequency unlock to 2200/10000
The moment to be very carefull.

So flshing cards.... Do or dont but if you do you should have a solid reasson otherwise... Dont.

On non software controllable VRMs such as gigabyte uses. There is still one compensation VID left in the code.

The bit triggers voltage changes.

My stock voltage is 1.12 at load, flashing some 280X I can get Max 1.21V. So the moral is... You actually need to measure voltages by hand after each flashing. Software monitoring does not work. In my case I wanted actually that, as I could OC more, but if you already have higher voltage you even could not boot the card, or it would bsod, had that both some other bioses.

I use an old 16MB xD card(came free with my Olympus camera). It's plenty big enough. It'll hold atiflash and well over 100 128KB roms. Recommending 64MB or greater is overkill to the extreme. You could actually get by with 2MB easily.

I use an old 16MB xD card(came free with my Olympus camera). It's plenty big enough. It'll hold atiflash and well over 1000 128KB roms. Recommending 64MB or greater is overkill to the extreme. You could actually get by with 2MB easily.

Haha your right but that's a bit of semantics even a normal 64 or 128mb drive is hard to come by being that most are sold in 4gb or larger nowadays. Maybe you can still purchase 16mb flash cards but alas its been mostly phased out from what iv seen. Not to mention 64mb is the LEAST I would recommend considering our linux brothers will need the help of a bootable ISO which is sure to take up a bit more than 16mb

I tried to flash an eah6850 to eah6870 and I get a series of bleeps from the internal pc speaker. I swapped the vga to cpu with the card still in but still bleeps. I will try again tomorrow plugging into the 2nd PCI-e port. I guess I asked for it, there is no backup bios, infact I can't even locate a bios chip.

I tried to flash an eah6850 to eah6870 and I get a series of bleeps from the internal pc speaker. I swapped the vga to cpu with the card still in but still bleeps. I will try again tomorrow plugging into the 2nd PCI-e port. I guess I asked for it, there is no backup bios, infact I can't even locate a bios chip.

I tried to flash an eah6850 to eah6870 and I get a series of bleeps from the internal pc speaker. I swapped the vga to cpu with the card still in but still bleeps. I will try again tomorrow plugging into the 2nd PCI-e port. I guess I asked for it, there is no backup bios, infact I can't even locate a bios chip.

I found a tip here. You have to set the default display adapter. With my Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 only the default adapter will show a signal so not only do you have to change the cable from PCI-E to Intergrated graphics (or PCI or PCI-E 2 ect) you have to set the bios ahead of time. In effect there is no way around having to remove the badly flashed card, even a full bios reset defaults to PCI-E (1) i.e. the primary PCI-E slot.

So I recommend working this piece of information into the "HELP i've flashed but I can't boot up" section!

I found a tip here. You have to set the default display adapter. With my Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 only the default adapter will show a signal so not only do you have to change the cable from PCI-E to Intergrated graphics (or PCI or PCI-E 2 ect) you have to set the bios ahead of time. In effect there is no way around having to remove the badly flashed card, even a full bios reset defaults to PCI-E (1) i.e. the primary PCI-E slot.

So I recommend working this piece of information into the "HELP i've flashed but I can't boot up" section!

I see it there now. I guess you just can't help people who don't read it properly. However I do think its a good idea to highlight this as I did fear the worst because I had enabled the IGFX (IGPU) but evidently overlooked the setting to specify the primary display output.

I must have missed/dismissed the relevant info in point 3 and then after the bad flash went elsewhere with more keen attention to detail.

Just to be absolutely clear, my bios has a setting to enable IGPU and a setting to set the primary display adapter; you must have the both set correctly or you will default to the primary PCI-E adapter (which in the case of a failed flash causes a failed post). When u fail to post after enabling the IGPU bearing in mind you've got your head stuck inside your pc case you tend to assume you've bricked your card unrecoverably.

- if you have no IGP or backup GPU buy a cheap 10$ on ebay/2nd hand before u flash. Having to flash blind is a pain in the ass. It also safes you from cat pic withdrawal symptoms.
- one reason for flashing is to correct annoying fan curves (I m looking at u Gigabyte) starting at a forced minimum of 30 or 40% idle.

Heh, apparently flash memory endurance is messing with us both today. I just had a PNY 128GB flash drive I got as a freebie bundle-item off newegg refuse to format... I should feel jipped I think, but it WAS free...